On the fingers of one hand: Jewish Museum Curator Mason Klein addresses Man Ray’s “otherness”.
Man Ray, "Self-Portrait" (1924)
When I predicted the top museum shows of 2009 for ARTINFO back in January, I remember being particularly excited about this one, Alias Man Ray: The Art of ReInvention that opens at the Jewish Museum on Sunday (and runs through next March). Now that I have had a chance to preview the show, I am delighted to say that it is even better than I hoped. As well as providing a full-scale retrospective of this most interdisciplinary of artists – the first here since 1974, apparently – the show focuses on Man Ray’s tortured discomfort with his own identity and on the complex ways in which it affected his work.
Formal portrait of the Radnitzky family, 1896
Born Emmanuel Radnitzky to Russian Jewish parents in Philadelphia in 1890, the child who would become Man Ray moved with his family to Williamsburg in 1907. This show explores how for the whole of his artistic career – as a New York Dada, a Parisian surrealist, an international portrait and fashion photographer, and as a painter, sculptor, photographer, film-maker, writer, activist, and inventor of the cameraless Rayograph – he suppressed knowledge of those beginnings, and ironically created an artistic persona whose mystery and rootlessness was basic to its success.
Man Ray, "Rayograph" (1926)
The man behind the show, and behind its utterly persuasive argument, is Jewish Museum Curator Mason Klein. (Mr Klein has also edited the excellent and entertaining catalog of the show which is published in collaboration with Yale University Press and which I heartily recommend.)Yesterday I sat down with him over a cup of coffee and he outlined the five principal reasons why his show is worth the trip up to East 92nd Street:
This show addresses Man Ray’s otherness. He has remained a mysterious character and we try to provide a whole new perspective on understanding him. Man Ray sought both notoriety and oblivion; he had to remain an outsider. It’s only now, after twenty years of identity politics that we can ask, “How did being Jewish at the beginning of the twentieth century matter in Man Ray’s work? What does it mean?” I don’t think he was expecting to encounter the anti-Semitism that he did. As much as artists tried to fight xenophobic tendencies, and believed that Dada could be a trans-national movement with a global language, there was such an order to the art world back then.
Man Ray, "Indestructible Object" (1923/1965)
Man Ray may well have been the first Jewish member of the European avant-garde. He was certainly the first to have been embraced by the European avant-garde. And for him to become a member of the avant-garde, he felt that he had to be seen in a different way from having Brooklyn, Russian, Jewish immigrant parents with sweatshop experience. I think that for his generation of artists, who came at the time of the waves of immigration in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, there was a need to demand some neutrality, so that you’d be allowed equal terms with other artists, and not relegated to some cultural niche. That’s why everyone changed their names.
Man Ray, "Marcel Duchamp, Solarized Portrait" (1930)
I try to play down Marcel Duchamp here. Duchamp’s influence was so pervasive that there isn’t an artist who hasn’t been influenced by him, but because he and Man Ray were such close collaborators, Man Ray has really suffered. He has been subsumed within the radiant aura of Marcel Duchamp.
Man Ray, "Gift" (c. 1958; replica of 1921 original)
Man Ray felt that his historical place had not been acknowledged. He felt that abstract expressionism – particularly as it was being commandeered critically by Clement Greenberg – was facile, if not entirely empty of subject matter. So he began to do these “natural paintings” just to show that anybody could do that kind of abstract painting automatically. He felt that he had spent decades dredging himself psychoanalytically in a way that the abstract expressionist artists had not, and that they were too market-driven and decorative.
Man Ray, "Lingerie" (1931)
The Rayographs purport to penetrate to the core, like an X-Ray. But what they really present is a flat contour of a form. They never really get to that impenetrable core. It’s a perfect procedure for Man Ray to be working in.
